Before the war, my friends and I would massacre each other at weekends, on a rolling stretch of  lawn that made a perfect battlefield. Flat enough for manoeuvres, it had hollows too, places to  belly-crawl or hold as snipers till dusk. That enclave obsessed us even more in autumn, when the  gardeners dug trenches for a new sprinkler system and uprooted palm trees, leaving bomb craters  everywhere. Facts on the ground changed, making us creep hole to hole, forever wary of falling into  an enemy bunker.  

When a pair of Falcons shrieked overhead, winging out toward the Gulf, we’d give chase  and watch them curve out of sight, white contrails the only clouds in the sky. The airbase bordered  our combat zone—humped hangars just visible through a barbed-wire fence—and we talked about  clipping through to watch the jets sortie at night, something we only ever heard in our sleep,  between the muezzin’s calls from the local mosque. We never made it, although we did sneak out  once, spending hours dodging camp security, until suddenly the world awoke—sky alive with plane  lights and thunder. The cavalry were riding in, and we miraculously caught the show.  

The Marines had come to protect us—and the oil company that employed our parents—but  their arrival only set our hearts on war. In the camp commissary, we bought AK-47s and M16s,  revolvers, Colts—someone even got a Cougar Magnum. There were Rambo knives and ninja  throwing stars. We stockpiled found ordnance too: sprinkler pipes, flammable cockroach spray, a  tennis ball packed with match-heads and slammed against a wall in hopes of detonation. We had  fireworks—bottle rockets stolen from an older brother—and contraband from unwatched garages:  duct tape, chain-link bike locks. Weapons changed hands, sometimes vanishing to frenzied  suspicion, then reappearing weeks later, no less mysteriously.  

The first rains in November ended trench warfare, swelling the ditches with sludge  overnight. While the gardeners shovelled them clear, we sought out fresh battlegrounds. A siren  training for Scuds called us home across the lawns, and at twilight we’d see test Patriots flash in the  overcast sky. School closed, our teachers flew, leaving us to roam the half-shuttered camp. Beyond  the airbase, we saw local fighters like us, raising rifles through the fence. They were company kids  too, but lived in their own country, beneath the spire of the mosque. We spoke the language of the  TV war reports: smart bomb, a line in the sand.  

That’s when we encountered Jared. He and his father had built a fort overlooking their  backyard wall, onto a track between Cactus and Dolphin Streets. Someone said he’d strafed  passersby, hurled grenades in ambush, and to lay eyes on that redoubt, you could only empathise. It  climbed halfway up a eucalyptus tree, all nailed planks and a roof of rusted iron. A blind could be  pulled down from within to protect him from potshots, and an escape rope hung down the trunk.  

I’d seen Jared in classes before, but never around the camp. He lived indoors, like the de clawed cats some houses kept. He had a spinal condition that made him clatter around on crutches,  hunched in on himself, loose-limbed. But now, at war, I noticed something new—a self-possession,  as if striding free. We’d fought for years amongst ourselves, and here was this upstart assaulting us,  refusing to buckle. High in his fort, he looked invincible, eyes like crosshairs as he shouldered a  bazooka. His insults exploded over our heads.  

We blitzed Jared’s fort for a week. He launched eggs, which provoked cans of cockroach  spray, hissing through punctured holes. But when rocket smoke suddenly poured from the blind, we  all shouted for Jared to get down, to get out—then just gaped at the blackening sky. Someone asked  

if he could escape without his dad, and another said no—the boy, on crutches after all, wasn’t even  meant to climb up there alone. And yet the fort had vanished in the smoke, along with Jared. We  fled to our homes, flinging pipe-ends and pistols in the grass.  

That night, the call came, and we had to evacuate the country. I kept my head down in the  airport, past the Marines in desert camo, the customs officials in their white thobe. Not a word about  Jared. The camp sparkled like lost treasure under our wing.  

*  

Of my friends, only I returned the following summer. My father said his pay grade had saved us,  just. A recession at home, millions hunting work, we could hardly afford to leave the Gulf. There  were new kids now, older like me, and no one seemed as interested in war. At dusk, they tossed a  baseball on our old battlefield.  

The camp itself remained the same: alphabetised streets, gardeners, perimeter fence. Except  the sky, which had turned to ash, as if Jared’s fort had kept smouldering away. I even cycled past to  check, but all signs of our war had disappeared, along with the eucalyptus tree. Another family had  moved in, and I had to stop myself knocking to ask if they knew about Jared. A silence was holding  things together.  

And the smoke had another cause, I learned. Iraqi soldiers had torched Kuwait’s oilfields  while they fled, for cover from airstrikes. In vain, as those Falcons could kill blind. Ten thousand  men on one road, so the news said. Guns strewn in the sand, like so many toys. But after a few  months, even the smoke had vanished, forgotten under the sun. 

Alex Sheal

Alex Sheal’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review, Litro and 3AM. He lives in Hanoi and is the owner of Vietnam in Focus.

childhood distance expats Gulf memoir memory violence war